A hypermedia system should be organized so as to make it possible to link together a large number of multimedia documents and let a system user move or navigate from any one document to another out of any predetermined order.
Until now, the communications protocols used in such environments were low-level protocols, which did allow communication between various applications, but required long, complex programming when there was a need, inter alia, to increase the number of functions in the editor programs which communicate within a hyperstructure or even to allow an editor to be integrated into a distributed environment. Thus, in a UNIX environment (trademark of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.), an RPC-type protocol ("Remote Procedure Call") is used, which is a low-level protocol. Similarly on PCs operating in a hypermedia environment under "Windows", for example with "Toolbook", a low-level protocol called DDE ("Dynamic Data Exchange" by Microsoft) is used. Currently, to promote editor communication and management, parts of programs have to be added to such protocols in such a way as to suggest a higher-level use, allowing several editors to be managed effectively and simply. Indeed, the protocols used today are not specifically oriented toward editors and, consequently, cannot easily authorize the addition of other functions to said editors or the integration of other editors into an existing environment. On the contrary, the current protocols can only add editors or integrate them into a hypermedia environment on the strict condition that an extremely long time is devoted to them, which can be measured in months, or even years.